Broadband service providers, such as cable service providers, provide a wide variety of services to any number of customers or households. Examples of services that are provided include television services, video on-demand services, telephone services, and Internet services. Certain service providers, such as cable service providers, typically utilize an infrastructure of fiber optic and radio frequency (“RF”) cables (i.e., coaxial cables) in order to communicate broadband signals to various customer or consumer devices, such as broadband set-top boxes and broadband moderns.
In conventional hybrid fiber coaxial (“HFC”) systems, a system associated with a service provider typically receives digital content from a plurality of content providers. The service provider system converts the received content into analog radio frequency (“RF”) data, and multiple RF data carriers are combined together utilizing a relatively complex RF combining network. The combined RF signal is then sampled and converted into a format that can be output by the service provider system, such as a format that can be output by an optical transmitter or laser. The operations performed by conventional systems often introduce unwanted noise into the data output by the service provider. For example, noise is added by the process of combining RF signals. Additionally, noise may also be added as a result of sampling signals to recreate a received signal. Moreover, conventional systems typically consume additional power to facilitate the conversion of received data into RF data and the combination of RF data.
Therefore, improved HFC architectures are desirable. Additionally, improved systems, methods, apparatus, and devices that facilitate signal processing within an HFC architecture are desirable.